Life & Times at SIBM

As someone has rightly said the world is not filled with black or white people. Instead everyone has some grey shades to his / her personality. But in my life interestingly till a couple of years back I had mostly met people who must be 70-80% white or probably I presumed so to say. But over the last few years things seem to have changed.

Taking one for granted, use and throw friendships, being friends for getting some work done, having excuses just to not meet – all this and more are becoming pretty common in today’s world. But then people would say that this existed all the time. There are all kinds of people on this planet some good some not so good and some horribly bad. You can’t make everyone really good, can you?

Have you dreamt of spending your life with your college sweet heart? Have you promised your college love of spending your lives together? Has your life revolved around your college flame? You don’t want to leave college because you are scared of parting with the love of your life? If the answer to even one of the above questions is yes, then you are in the category of millions.

When MS Dhoni smashed a six of Nuwan Kulasekara, there was a collective roar from the 1.2 billion in India as well as thousands of Indians across the world. It was the ultimate prize in cricket. It was the ultimate prize for Indian sport (since Indian sport has sadly been limited to cricket more less). It was the prize which all of us had been waiting for since the past 28 years. And finally when it was achieved, it was fitting that the captain who has led us to the Test No 1 ranking and the ICC T20 WC win in 2007 was at the forefront. The whole nation was on the roads honking with flags, with a euphoria which may have been seen only in 1947 when we got independence.

Going for long walks with your girlfriend or best friends, going to movies after bunking classes, coming late to hostel, fighting with the warden, sleeping while the faculty is telling the most important of things, ogling at all the possible girls in your own as well as the junior batch, coming late to class so frequently that the day you come early, the faculty is shocked out of his / her daylights – College life is about all this and more.

Everyone talks about how college life makes you learn a lot many new things in life. Whether its learning to mix with different kinds of people, becoming independent, having a girlfriend, making relationships, college life is regarded as the period when you can make or break your life. There are so many memories that one can live a lifetime. A lifetime of happiness, joy, fun and full of beautiful moments.

Don’t know why I am writing this post. Don’t know why such stuff is there in my head. But today I feel a sense of loneliness, a sense of feeling that I am gonna lose something, a sense of something going to go wrong sometime somewhere in the near future. This isn’t the first time, I am feeling this way. Actually I can say I am used to it in a certain way. You must be wondering what I am talking about right?

Life plays many games with you. Some you like, some you don’t while many others you have take with a pinch of salt. One meets new people everytime in life be it school, college, work etc. Some stick for life so much that you can’t afford to let go off them and feel scared at just the thought of seeing them off or losing them (because that’s what you think when they leave somewhere right?). While many others don’t even bother whether you die or are alive.

But in the case of love, things are different most of the time. And that’s why the popular slogan or saying is that “Where love comes, friendship goes for a toss”. As in many of my earlier posts I have spoken about how love can change your life in such a way that in love, you end up doing this which you wouldn’t normally do. When one parts with his / her loved one, there is a feeling which creeps up which one cant describe at all. It feels as if one is moving away from something of his / her own, its as if one has lost a part of his / her own self.

Ok so why am I talking about this and blabbering and boring you all? It’s just something which I guess all experience in life and I have too. But there are some like me who keep thinking about such things more than many others. And today was one day I was back to my old self of contemplating about my future, thinking about relations – friends, loved ones and all that.

At the outset, I would like to say that I didn’t know any of the people involved in this and neither do I support or I am against whatever happened on the night of 1st August in a farmhouse in Theur, 27km away from Pune. On Sunday, 1st August, 489 students of Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies, Khadki, Pune were caught by the police for a suspected “Rave party”. Later they couldn’t find any evidence to call it a rave party and it turned out to be more of a random party like where alcohol worth thousands of rupees was found. I am of the view that a rave party is one where people are taking narcotic substances along with alcohol. But then our police and media call anything and everything a rave party these days.

My biggest question is to the police and the media. All you media guys, do you even freaking now that there are 35 colleges under the Symbiosis umbrella? Do you even care that what other students who would want to come to such institutes would think seeing such news? What the hell is Symbiosis Management Institute? In my knowledge there isn’t any college existing in that name ever. The students were from 1 of the 34 colleges. Who the hell gave you the right to blame the other 12? Don’t all of you – NDTV, Sahara Samay, Aaj Tak, Times of India, Asian Age and everyone know that there is a simple rule of confirming facts before publishing such news? But no! All you want is masala in your news items and more and more TRPs at the cost of people’s lives. All of you have just become money making machines and giving news to the people in the name of “We give people what they want”. HORRENDOUS!!!!!

And now to my next question. What is the problem if they were drinking? They were all MBA students. They surely must be above 22-23. So according to their age, they can drink or do what they want. No one is a kid here GUYS! No one is forced to drink or smoke or take drugs. Whatever they were doing, it would have been out of their free will. This doesn’t say that I am supporting them. But tell me, Which MBA college doesnt have freshers parties or for that matter such get togethers?

ITS JUST THAT WHEN MEDIA GETS SOME PIECE OF NEWS, THEY WANT TO JUMP ON IT TO INCREASE THEIR TRPs!!!!!

AND FOR ALL YOU DESPERATE VOYUERISTIC GUYS, WHO CAME TO MY BLOG BY TYPING SIBM PUNE FRESHERS PARTY ON SOME SEARCH ENGINE, THE PICS YOU SEE ARE OF OUR FRESHERS PARTY LAST YEAR!! I KNOW YOU ARE DESPERATE TO SEE NUDE FEMALES, KISSING OR SEX OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT. BUT SORRY YOU WON’T GET THAT HERE!

All you media guys are just the same – SICK!!!!!

PS – I DONT DRINK OR SMOKE OR TAKE DRUGS BY THE WAY! SAYING THIS BECAUSE I AM SURE MANY OF YOU WOULD HAVE SURELY THOUGHT THAT!!!

Below are two articles of how Times of India (read TABLOID) called this first Symbiosis Management Institute on 2nd August and then finally called it Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies on 3rd!!!
350 detained for organising Friendship Day party – 2nd August

PUNE: About 350 students of city’s Symbiosis Institute were detained by police for organising a “friendship day” party at a farm house at Theur near here.

Some of the students, including boys and girls, had consumed alcohol at the party which was held at the farm house last night without “proper permission”, rural police said on Monday.

The detained students were being subjected to a medical test to determine alcohol level in blood under provisions of Bombay Prohibition Act, they added.

Dr Vidya Yeravadekar, director, Symbiosis Institute when contacted told PTI that the students had sought permission of the hostel authorities for a “late out” but had failed to return within the time limit prescribed by the institute authorities.

It was not a “rave” party at which narcotic drugs are consumed, police said.

According to Yeravadekar, the girls detained at the farm house, has been released by police.

The students involved are doing their MBA at the Symbiosis Management Institute.

An internal enquiry would be set up to probe the incident, Yeravadekar added.

489 management students held for Pune ‘rave’ – 3rd August

PUNE: The police on Sunday night raided a party being held at a farmhouse at Theur, 27 km from Pune, and detained 489 students, most of them MBA students of Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies (SIMS).

Eighty-one students and seven others were later arrested for consuming liquor without permits and playing loud music. All of them were released on bail on Monday.

DSP Pravinsinh Pardeshi told TOI the students — aged between 22 and 28 — had organised a ‘‘freshers and friendship day’’ party at the farmhouse, ‘Sindhu’, located along the Pune-Solapur road, and owned by a Pune jeweller family. Pardeshi said the students arrived at the farmhouse in 10 buses around 8.30pm. Disturbed with loud music, residents called up cops around 11 pm. The residents were also angry with the parking of buses which led to traffic congestion.

When cops arrived there, the students told them that they had necessary permissions. Consequently, police approached the organisers, who said they did not have the required permissions. Police said there were 235 girls among the 489 students. They said 302 bottles of liquor and beer were recovered.

“However, nothing incriminating was recovered from students,’’ police inspector Balasaheb Mandge said. Principal director, Symbiosis Society, Vidya Yeravdekar, said the institute has taken a serious note of the incident. She admitted 350 students were from SIMS hostels. She said Symbiosis has appointed a four-member committee to probe the incident. The institute is located at Range Hills, Khadki. Seven doctors conducted a medical examination on the students. The police arrested 81 students and the seven organisers. All the girls were allowed to go, he said.

AND FOR THE INFORMATION OF THOSE WHO THINK THAT PEOPLE WHO DO ALL THIS DONT STUDY, I AM SORRY THAT YOU ARE SADLY MISTAKEN!!!

6th July 2009 was when I made my first post on this blog. I give the sole credit to Himanshu Bhagat (2008-10) batch of SIBM Pune MBA Marketing for “indirectly” bringing out the social media guy in me. A team called the Internet Communications and Blogging team was established a year back to maintain the Official SIBM Blog and the entire online communications of SIBM Pune. I applied, got selected and the rest is history.

As my first post says, I used to write earlier in bits and pieces like some articles in Times of Oman and had been a part of editorial teams at college. But my real writing began when I started blogging. Be it my love life, friends, political issues, social issues, economic issues, I began writing about anything and everything. While writing, I realised that there was so much I wanted to speak about but probably wasnt able to. So if one isnt able to communicate very well in terms of physical communication, writing is the best medium to reach out to the world out there.

As I went on writing, I also realised that if I was interested in something, I could write a post about it in just 20 mins. Many people have always asked me as to how I choose the topics for my blog posts. I would like to say that whatever I write, I strongly feel about each of those things. I never make a conscious attempt to think much before on a topic and then write. Whenever I get an idea to write on something, I just pen down my thoughts.

Interestingly on the same day I joined Twitter too. This was also too for the team work. But I did create my account because I was told to do so. Truthfully speaking I didnt know anything about Twitter before and had the usual question as to what should I tweet about. Till November I had just about 150-200 tweets. But then all of a sudden I started tweeting like crazy. As I started getting the hang of it, I realised the importance of networking. This is the reason I improved my Linkedin account to what it has become today.

And so today, I am connected to 280 odd people on Linkedin, have 12,600+ visits on my blog with more than 7000+ new visitors with a rank of 72/100 by Indiblogger and 550 odd followers on Twitter. The statistics apart, I have realised the importance of having a very good social media presence in these times.

There are a couple of things I know I still have to improve on my blog like the design, making it interactive etc. Its all a work in progress and I am sure with time I would able to improve a hell lot.

Lately I have began my biggest ever project ever – Writing a novel. I have miles and miles to go before I sleep and I really want to be in this field for a long run.

Exams are the most important event in a student’s life. They decide one’s future if the person is in 10th or 12th like the college he / she would join and the career he / she would choose. When one is in college they decide a person’s future in terms of final placements, jobs etc. Not to forget all along especially in our country they help “differentiate” the best of the students from the rest. Though it’s always said that mugging and vomiting in the exam papers isn’t good and marks are not the be all and end all, it’s always remained like that and will remain. Ok I now I am boring you guys with a lot of such stuff.

My basic point here is to talk about how life is lived around exam days. When I was at school it was all so different. Parents were there to make sure I slept on time, ate on time, there was no disturbance like TV and computers, no one came into my room, no phone calls and what not. Though they always wanted me to sleep early in the night so that I would be fresh for the next day, me the person I am :P used to be awake till late studying in the street light and screwing up my eyesight.

At the undergrad and postgrad level it’s a completely different ballgame altogether. There are 101 ways of getting distracted and even if one can’t find ways to get distracted, some or the other way comes about by itself! There maybe friends who want to disturb a person whose studying, people may watch movies and play music at the highest decibels, the most intense discussions on the weirdest of topics happen during these times, the best and most delicious Maggi is made during the exam season and the most interesting of all things like IPL, the World Cup and a plethora of other events happen during this time which are sure to make one say “SAALA AISE TIME PE HI EXAM KYON HOTA HAI!

And as you can all see here, even though I have my Organizational Behaviour exam tomorrow, I planned so well that I studied in the morning, watched the match (though which CSK sadly lost ), tweeted quite a bit and also blogged.
That’s what we-to-be MBA Grads call “TIME MANAGEMENT”! :P;)

Finally my long awaited post on the journey of Team Ecclesia – The literary events of Transcend – SIBM Pune’s cultural and management fest is here. This post is not about Transcend ’10 – that is the events, the fest, the participants or about the different events that were organized over the three days – 5th, 6th and 7th Feb 2010. But it is about one specific set of events called Ecclesia – The literary event “bouquet” (I came up with this word :P) of Transcend ’10. Its about the journey as to how a team of 5 at first was reduced to 4 and then it practically though not literally became a team of just two individuals. But despite all the hardships and difficulties Ecclesia had to face and the fact that it was one of the underdogs, it proved all the critics and naysers wrong with amazing participation from IIMs, XLRI, SP Jain, NITIE and FMS to name a few.

It was almost the end of December I think and I as usual was wondering whether I would get a chance to do something during Transcend ’10. I have always had this interest in working in different things – and working for the college fest is one of them be it Riviera at VIT University or Transcend at SIBM Pune. One fine day, I got a call from the Co- Curricular (Co-C) team saying that they wanted me to report to the Team Room by so and so time in the evening as they wanted me to be a part of a team to organize some event. When I reached there, I found 4 other people along with the Co-C team. People most of whom I knew but some I didn’t but none to whom I really spoke much to. As time went by, the Co-C team explained that they wanted us to organize the Literary events for Transcend ’10. They gave us an idea of the theme and the scale at which it was going to be organized. The number of events, kind of events, judges, rules everything was left to our discretion. Lo! Till then I was wondering whether I would get to do something for Transcend and here they had given us the entire charge of organizing a set of events from scratch. Now this did seem big!!!

As the work slowly started, the number of members dwindled to 4 because one of the team mates decided that he wouldn’t be able to give the event enough time as he also had his duties for the council team. In the meanwhile Priyanka Negi, the only team member who I hadn’t interacted with ever before and me started meeting up to discuss as to how we should go forward with Ecclesia – in terms of the number of events, rules, kinds of events to be had etc. Before meeting up in the Co-C room for the first time, I had known Priyanka as Preeti’s sister and I “guess” (because not sure :P) that she had probably heard of me as some “blogger”. But many more meetings later, where most of the times despite our incessant calling the other two team mates didn’t turn up (though sometimes they did), we came to know each other much much better. She started calling me Frusto (short for Frustogi – now that’s what many of my friends used to call me at VIT because I easily get frustrated) and also told me about how and why people call her Didi – The DIDI of the college :). The sad part was that for many of the meetings with Co-C also, our whole team wasn’t present.

But the greatest thing which I have gained by working for Transcend ’10 is the fact that I have got a really sweet and simple friend like Priyanka. I guess the biggest problem with me is that It is difficult for me to find people who match with my wavelength or with my thought process many times. After living in the conservative and much more orthodox and simple environs of South India for four years, it was a big change for me when I first came to Pune. People trying to be unnecessarily hep, stylish or showing off when not needed are the biggest turn – offs for me. Obviously all are not like that. But then one has got to take the pain of finding the simple ones out of the huge sea of attitudish ones. The way I can be myself and talk about my life with her without being worried as to what she will think is really nice :).

Over different meetings among ourselves and with the Co-C team we finalized the events – Parchment Power paper presentation and Spar Wars – The ultimate public speaking event consisting of JAM, Extempore and Debate. Ecclesia was the only event in Transcend ’10 to be partly cultural and partly management. A paper presentation competition was organized at Transcend for the first time. But the number of entries (35+) it attracted from the top institutes of the country showed the fact as to how much the top colleges value events at SIBM Pune and Transcend in particular. After some initial problems on finalizing the judges, we managed to finalize them a couple of days before the event. In between all this, Priyanka and me had also worked for an HR Case Study in DOMS IIT M for which if we had been selected, we would have had to go on 30th Jan 2010. In hindsight, both of us were happy that we didn’t get selected because if we had gone, then Ecclesia wouldn’t have been half as successful as it was.

As the day dawned nearer, the excitement was palpable in the air. The paper presentation was the first event of Transcend ’10 at 11am on 5th Feb. Contrary to our expectations we did have a lot of work on the final day to in terms of the audio visual system, buzzer, taking care of the judges etc. The standard of presentations was really good (obviously it would be because they were the top 6 selected) and XLRI with the presentation on “Management Insights from Mythology” emerged as the winners. Spar Wars (An event where there was initial apprehension from the Co-C team as to organizing JAM because they were worried about who would judge) turned out to be a cracker. It was 3 hours of ultimate objection, arguments and interesting speeches. In the end Avinash from Symbiosis Law School and Sanjeev from SIBM Pune emerged as the winners. Spar wars was an on the spot event while Parchment Power was a pre – registered event.

All in all Ecclesia turned out to be a tremendous success and the biggest thing other than the certificates and working in a team and all the blah blah which I gained from this event is finding a friend like Priyanka :).

THREE CHEERS TO TEAM ECCLESIA!!! IT WAS AN EXPERIENCE OF A LIFETIME :)